All the best of Microsoft’s MacBook Air benchmarks

Microsoft is on a mission to ditch the MacBook Air with the new Copilot Plus range of computers. It’s so confident it’s finally got Windows on the Arm right that it spent an entire day pitting the new Surface Laptop against a MacBook Air at its headquarters in Redmond, Washington, last month. threshold multiple benchmarks and real-world simulated tests were featured to demonstrate a new Qualcomm-powered Surface Laptop beating Apple’s best-selling laptop.

While I’ve previously covered Microsoft’s confidence in beating Apple’s M3 processor, I thought it would be useful to go over all the benchmark claims and battery life ratings in detail. Microsoft touched on some of this during its Surface and Windows AI event last week, but the claims on stage weren’t always as detailed as what Microsoft employees showed me last month.

I wasn’t able to run the benchmarks myself, but the results should serve as an important data point as we approach the launch of these Copilot Plus computers on June 18. It’s also important to note that, unlike Apple’s MacBook Air, Microsoft’s new Surface Laptop isn’t fanless, allowing it to squeeze out more performance. Microsoft only compared its Surface Laptop to the MacBook Air M3 — not a fan-equipped MacBook Pro.

Benchmarks aren’t everything, however, and we’ll have a better idea of ​​true real-world performance and battery life when we review the Surface Laptop next month.

Microsoft kicked off benchmark day by first measuring raw performance between the Surface Laptop and the MacBook Air M3. It made two benchmark claims, showing stable performance using the Cinebench 2024 multi-threaded workload and peak performance using the Geekbench 6 multi-threaded test.

The Surface Laptop achieved a score of 980 on Cinebench 2024 multithreaded and a score of 14,000 on Geekbench 6 multithreaded. Microsoft avoided highlighting the single-threaded results of both benchmarks, presumably because the MacBook Air would score slightly better here.

Either way, Microsoft claims its new Surface Laptop will beat a MacBook Air M3 in Cinebench multi-threaded workloads by 50 percent. In Geekbench 6, the Surface Laptop is only 16 percent better. On stage last week, Microsoft also claimed that its Copilot Plus range of computers will be “58 percent faster than a MacBook Air M3”.

Next, Microsoft covered what it described as “real performance.” The main test here was a HandBrake ToS benchmark, which measures how long it takes to encode a 4K video file. The Surface Laptop with a Snapdragon X Elite managed this in five minutes, eight seconds, faster than the six minutes and 26 seconds it took the MacBook Air M3.

More importantly, this was twice as fast as the Surface Laptop 5 with a 12th Gen Intel Alder Lake CPU, which took 10 minutes, 30 seconds to complete the task. A Surface Laptop 4 took even longer at 13 minutes and 32 seconds.

Microsoft’s comparisons with the MacBook Air M3 also extend to battery life. During tests, I saw Microsoft simulate battery life during web browsing and video playback. Microsoft uses a script to simulate web browsing. On the 2022 Intel-based Surface Laptop 5, it took eight hours and 38 minutes to completely drain the battery; The new Surface Laptop lasted twice as long, clocking in at 16 hours and 56 minutes. That beats the same test on a 15-inch MacBook Air M3, which lasted 15 hours and 25 minutes.

Microsoft ran a similar video playback test, which saw the Surface Laptop last over 20 hours, with the MacBook Air M3 clocking in at 17 hours, 45 minutes. That’s also nearly eight hours longer than the Surface Laptop 5, which lasted 12 hours and 30 minutes.

Microsoft claimed on stage last week that the new Copilot Plus computers with Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Elite processor will offer “20 percent more battery life than the latest 15-inch MacBook Air.”

The final benchmarks that Microsoft showed me were related to NPU performance. Microsoft claims the NPU inside the Snapdragon X Elite is nearly twice as fast in AI acceleration tasks as Apple’s M3 Neural Engine in the cross-platform Procyon AI Computer Vision benchmark.

The Surface Laptop scored 1,745 on the Procyon AI Score, while the MacBook Air achieved 889. Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Elite has 45 HORSES of AI acceleration performance, far more than the 18 TOPS found in the M3.

Microsoft also showed the Surface Laptop achieving a 4.5x inference efficiency for its fast Phi Silica model processing over the M3, along with 24 TOPS/watt of peak inference efficiency.